Edoardo Ballerini

I’ve never liked the term “retreat” to describe the act of going away for a few days of meditation and restoration.  It should more accurately be called “advance.”  The notion that leaving our offices and crowded streets, our email, Facebook and Twitter lives for a few days represents going backwards is slightly offensive, but the conditioning is fierce, even amongst the enlightened who surely coined the phrase.

Either way, I’ll be going on one of these things soon, and I need it.  And even before I go, I’ll be retreating from information overload as best I can while still riding the 2/3 train with an iPhone in my pocket.  The theory that anything can be achieved through lack of sleep, drinking buckets of coffee, and making sure no day goes without at least ten things to do is being met with a stiff challenge.  It’s hard to get around if you can’t lift your legs or think straight… so, it’s time for a break.

I don’t regret my use-every-minute approach of the last year.  I got a lot done.  The list is pretty extraordinary, really, and there’s no question it was achieved through a fierce desire to make things happen (and the aid of caffeine), but it’s time to rest.  Were I to keep going I might collapse somewhere, and that would just be silly, even if I could take some idiotic pride in having literally run myself into the ground.

No, I’m going to try to be a little bit wiser than that.  After all, didn’t one of the achievements of the last year have something to do with awareness?

So, I’m off to an advance…

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.